Welcome, come one come all! Lay your eyes upon what could’ve been the largest cargo aircraft ever built, she’s nearly twice as big as the Antonov AN-225, and dwarfs all other aircraft who meet them! Introducing, the Boeing PhantomWorks “Pelican” ULTRA, an absolutely massive cargo aircraft that relies on ground effect for extreme fuel efficient flight over the ocean, transporting cargo ships’ worth of freight at high speeds across the world!

Image Gallery:

I’ve pictured it flying alongside the CL-1201 in the thumbnail and the image gallery, to truly give the viewers a sense of how massive the Pelican is, seeing that the CL-1201’s even larger ridiculous size is a little more obvious; it’s wingspan peaks at 1,120ft.

The Pelican ULTRA actually came very close to being built, the only thing that prevented it from soaring off the blueprints was maintenance costs, and construction efforts. This aircraft would’ve taken up massive amounts of maintenance time before and after flight, and the amount of time, money, and materials spent to create even one of these monster planes would’ve been astronomical. Regardless however, if this aircraft were to be built, it would have humbled pretty much anything before it. Any cargo aircraft, any passenger aircraft, any flying thing at all would bow down towards it. Except for the CL-1201, had it been built too.

To put the Pelican’s capabilities into perspective, here’s some statistics about it’s cargo, weight, among other things:

Maximum Carrying Capacity: Roughly 3,000 passengers, or 2,800,000lbs of freight
Empty Weight: Roughly 2,160,000lbs
Maximum Takeoff Weight: Roughly 6,000,000lbs
Cargo Dimensions: Roughly 30,000ft²
Example Cargo:
- 10 CH-47 Chinooks
- 70 HEMTT Trucks
- 52 M270 Rocket Launcher Vehicles
- 17 M1A2 Abrams Tanks

The Boeing PhantomWorks Pelican ULTRA has an absolutely ridiculous landing gear setup, like a massive caterpillar tread system with wheels instead of tracks. All necessary however to hold up its massive weight, even some airports wouldn’t be strong enough to hold it’s weight simply by sitting on the tarmac or apron, let alone boasting a long enough runway for it to take off. Of course, there are some runways that could accommodate the Pelican, but most would likely not be able to handle one.

The Pelican ULTRA’s size is of course reputable, with a 500ft wingspan and a fuselage larger than an entire Boeing 747, it certainly proves its worth. But size isn’t the only thing ridiculous about the Pelican; The Pelican is powered by four contra-rotating Turbo-Props, but these are no ordinary Turbo-Props. To provide some background information, the strongest jet engine ever created, the GE-90-115B, is a massive turbofan engine that produces roughly 127,000lbs of thrust, the diameter of the engine itself is nearly as wide as the fuselage of a Boeing 737. Additionally, a Turbo-Prop Engine is a propellor mounted to the fan spinner of a jet engine, generating ridiculous amount of power compared to a normal prop, in a more fuel efficient manner than a typical jet engine, albeit with less power than a jet engine.

Regardless, the Pelican ULTRA is special; it’s engines are a GE-90-115B Contra-Rotating Turbo-Prop Hybrid, called LM-6000 GE-90 engines, and there’s four of them. All of these are capable of producing well over enough power to send the Pelican ULTRA barreling through the skies with a top speed of over 450mph; each engine produces 60-80,000hp! With GE-90 turboprop engines, each boasting 50ft propellor blades, it’s no difficult job for the Pelican to fly at high speeds, and even high altitudes too, with a maximum service ceiling of roughly 25,000ft.

Now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for:

Controls:

Normal aircraft controls, i.e. Throttle & Pitch+Roll+Yaw. VTOL for flaps, AG-1 for Cargo-Bay Door. Takeoff speed with full flaps is roughly 170-180mph. This replica has really weird stall characteristics, so it tends to remain flying with full flaps even at a little less than 100mph, which of course would not be the case with the actual Pelican ULTRA, but SimplePlanes is weird. Additionally, the maneuverability of my replica may be slightly over exaggerated, but I’ve based it off of the maneuverability of most cargo planes that’ve been built previously; from what I’ve seen, most large cargo aircrafts are actually sorta agile when flying without any payload, examples being the C-130, C-5, and C-17 that I’ve seen in videos. So I’ve designed the Pelican’s flight model to be somewhat reminiscent of what I’ve seen in other cargo aircrafts, considering the Pelican is quite similar to other four engine cargo aircrafts, just scaled up larger.

Some final notes about the aircraft, you may notice with my replica here that the props don’t have movement blurring, and that’s just because I used overload to prevent the props from moving fast enough to blur. I edited them to be like this to give them a sense of size, seeing how massive those propellor blades really are. I did the same with a previously posted aircraft of mine, the Birchwood Behemoth. I take inspiration from AC-7’s Arsenal Bird, and how it’s prop blades also don’t completely blur while moving at max RPM, I really like how it gives them an extreme illusion of size and power, especially with the giant whooshing sounds that the Arsenal Bird’s blades make. If I could create that sound in SP, I’d give it to my absolutely massive flying wings that bare intimidation props, and my Birchwood Behemoth as well.

Anyway, I think I’ve said enough for now-
Have Fun!